Tania Jacob

Nico Weber, Patrick Holzer, Tania Jacob et al.

Federated Learning as a decentralized artificial intelligence (AI) solution solves a variety of problems in industrial applications. It enables a continuously self-improving AI, which can be deployed everywhere at the edge. However, bringing AI to production for generating a real business impact is a challenging task. Especially in the case of Federated Learning, expertise and resources from multiple domains are required to realize its full potential. Having this in mind we have developed an innovative Federated Learning framework FACT based on Fed-DART, enabling an easy and scalable deployment, helping the user to fully leverage the potential of their private and decentralized data.

Patrick Holzer, Tania Jacob, Shubham Kavane

Federated clustering, an integral aspect of federated machine learning, enables multiple data sources to collaboratively cluster their data, maintaining decentralization and preserving privacy. In this paper, we introduce a novel federated clustering algorithm named Dynamically Weighted Federated k-means (DWF k-means) based on Lloyd's method for k-means clustering, to address the challenges associated with distributed data sources and heterogeneous data. Our proposed algorithm combines the benefits of traditional clustering techniques with the privacy and scalability benefits offered by federated learning. The algorithm facilitates collaborative clustering among multiple data owners, allowing them to cluster their local data collectively while exchanging minimal information with the central coordinator. The algorithm optimizes the clustering process by adaptively aggregating cluster assignments and centroids from each data source, thereby learning a global clustering solution that reflects the collective knowledge of the entire federated network. We address the issue of empty clusters, which commonly arises in the context of federated clustering. We conduct experiments on multiple datasets and data distribution settings to evaluate the performance of our algorithm in terms of clustering score, accuracy, and v-measure. The results demonstrate that our approach can match the performance of the centralized classical k-means baseline, and outperform existing federated clustering methods like k-FED in realistic scenarios.